By Jason Campbell
Recently I ran 5 sessions of TTRPGs from a Friday through the following Wednesday. I didn’t realize this until I’d already committed to all of these games, and at first I thought that was a lot to prep and run. Looking back on it, it’s not much different than running at a game convention, but it’s more than I usually run outside of a gaming event. Here’s some details on each game and then I’ll summarize my thoughts.
Friday: Six-Gun Doomsday at the CRIT Online Convention
CRIT (Community Run Infinite Tabletop) is an online convention that ran this year from June 20th through June 28th. It involves games in many different time zones in various independent game systems, and it’s all free. I set all my games for 3 hour sessions. On Friday I ran a one-shot adventure from our upcoming Six-Gun Doomsday adventure setting that combines Weird West with Gothic Horror and Post-Apocalypse. I had four players, a few new to the Cypher System that this game uses. I’m used to running games for players new to a TTRPG system, so I have an introduction prepared to take about a half hour. I run these in Discord only, and send out pre-gen characters as PDF. I don’t need a battle grid, and post images in Discord as needed and we use Discord for audio and text chat, with video optional.
The adventure went well, everyone loved the setting and had a good time. The adventure ended in a satisfying conclusion in 3 hours. I have been writing and modifying this adventure for a white so I didn’t need to create any scenarios. The prep I had to do was in preparing and distributing the PDfs.
Saturday: Tales of the Valiant at My FLGS for Free RPG Day
Saturday was Free RPG Day. Free RPG Day is similar to Record Store Day or Free Comic Book Day – several TTRPG suppliers have free products available at local game stores, most exclusive to the event. My local store organized many game sessions over the weekend to play these games. I ran Kobold Press’s Well of Shadows adventure for their 5e based Tales of the Valiant system. I had 4 players who were familiar with 5e Dungeons & Dragons but not Tales of the Valiant. The session went well and the players had fun (all but one, who really just wanted to play his usual D&D game).
The adventure itself takes some GM interpretation to run, and it’s too bad it doesn’t really showcase the upcoming Labyrinth game setting well. I had to read this a couple of times to prepare, and because I knew my players were curious about the Tales of the Valiant system I prepped a bullet list of the major differences between 5e D&D and 5e Tales of the Valiant. The one thing that would have made prep longer is if I wasn’t familiar with the Tales of the Valiant Player’s Guide.
Sunday: Hint Murder Mystery at the CRIT Online Convention
Sunday night I ran a one-shot murder mystery TTRPG called Hint that we released earlier this year. Hint was based on the Cypher System, but if you’re a Cypher fan you might not even recognise it. I greatly pared down the rules to only what was needed to run a murder mystery, and made wholesale changes to things like the function of a focus.
The changes I’d made weren’t confusing for my 3 players as they weren’t familiar with Cypher. Hint is a very open game (similar to games from The Gauntlet) that invites the players to contribute to the story more than many TTRPGs. This can be challenging for the GM since you want to let the players get used to this style if they aren’t used to it. It’s best if the GM reads the player group, and at the beginning directs open questions to players who seem more comfortable with this. Usually the other players will get the idea and bring their ideas into the story. I didn’t have to prep much for this game as I’d already created the adventure and the pre-gen characters when we published it.
Monday: My The Strange Home Game
My “home game” (it’s run online) is played weekly on Monday evenings. We’re playing a long campaign of The Strange, a Cypher System based setting from Monte Cook Games. It’s been interesting, this was our 8th session and half of the group hadn’t played Cypher System before, so they’re getting used to the weird setting while they learn a new rules system. This creates many bumps in the beginning, and means I need to stay focused on keeping an interesting scenario going. I’m creating our own scenarios using a lot of the lore from the setting book. I’d prepared for this session the previous week so this session ran smoothly.
Wednesday: Six-Gun Doomsday at the CRIT Online Convention
Wednesday I ran the same adventure I ran on Friday, so it should have been easy, right? I had 2 players for this one. I’d also decided to change some of the scenarios, based on my experience from the previous sessions. The adventure takes place in the middle of the larger adventure from Six-Gun Doomsday, and the other parts of that adventure are not completed yet. The players from this session took some actions which sped up the progression of the characters so that they were heading to scenarios from the next adventure section. I really don’t like forcing the characters to do things when they’ve legitimately or purposely avoided them, so I just moved on to the scenarios ahead that were only partially planned. It went well, but I’m sure it felt a bit scattered to the players, as I had to improv a lot to work a satisfying conclusion at 3 hours into the session.
Conclusion
I successfully ran all the games above and was happy with the results. I did feel a bit mentally drained after Wednesday’s game, and I don’t usually get that way. But it wasn’t terrible and I continued writing Thursday and ran another game a few days later.
If you’re thinking about running many sessions in a few days, the most important thing is to account for all the time you’ll need. Don’t just plan for a 3 or 4 hour session, plan for the time you’ll need to prepare the adventure and for the travel time to and from if necessary. When figuring out prep time, round the time up and plan for a bit of extra time between sessions in case something takes longer than you’d estimated. Make sure you plan in a way that lets you have fun. You’re a GM but you should have a good time too!
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